December 05, 2003

The Globe and Mail ran a leading article on November 25/03 that revealed the preliminary results of the $34 million research project Understanding the Early Years. Bottom line, the facts are in we have to start to work hard to help kids get ready to learn before they go to school. The issue is parenting and the driver is not poverty in terms of money but poverty in terms of ability to parent.

Some key findings:

In the Dixie Bloor area of Peel Region, 3 communities of 80,000 people just west of Toronto, 28% of 5 and 6 year olds lack the language skills to graduate from senior Kindergarten to Grade 1. Yet the area has fewer low income families (earning under $25,000) than the Canadian average. 18.8% versus 22% for the nation. A high proportion of single mums, recent immigrants and weak community have given these kids a poor start the study says.

The numbers suggest that in a typical class of 25, 7 kids are in over their heads. (Likely to be 5 boys and 2 girls)

A separate study by Peel school board found that boys are much more likely to be unready for school than girls. "Too often, the difficulties these children face are painfully obvious from the early stages. Equally obvious is that many will never catch up".

We are going to have to rethink "education". We can no longer think of it as something that the schools do alone. The future of our kids is with us, their parents and the time to get involved is before they are born

December 04, 2003

Berkeley High School senior Chris Carlisle isn't planning to apply to University of California-Berkeley this year. In fact, he's not sending any applications to college.
"I want to be a firefighter," Carlisle says. "I just ain't thought about college."

Carlisle's decision reflects a growing national trend -- fewer men are choosing to go to college, and now make up just under 44 percent of students enrolled in degree-granting institutions across the country.

With this phenomenon, UC Berkeley's gender gap has reversed. At 54 percent of the college-age student body, women outnumber men in every ethnic group except among whites.

"It's pretty cool," says junior sociology major Maritza Barajas. "Before, women experienced so many restrictions when it came to higher education. Now we're less dependent on men economically."

But among minorities, the gap is extreme. Of about 1,200 black students on campus this fall, nearly 800 are women. Asian-American females outnumber Asian-American males by more than 1,000.

Such an unbalanced increase in female presence on college campuses may not be altogether healthy, some experts say.

December 02, 2003

This year 70% of the "Freshmen" at UPEI are women. Is this a victory for feminism or is it the sign of something terribly wrong? Who will these women marry and who will father their children? An answer maybe no one. Is this OK? Maybe not.

All around me, Professors, lawyers, business leaders tell me that most of the great candidates for jobs are women. Is this a good thing? Maybe but what has happened to the men? I met this week with a woman who was a premier of a province and now is a senator. When she was an undergraduates, she was the only woman in her class. In a few years time her situation will be reversed. There might be one man in the class. Is this a good thing? Surely not.

So what has happened? Here is a link not to a rant but to a very thoughtful article on what might have happened.

Snip:So the first step toward a sensible debate about manly pride is to rescue the positive tradition of manliness from three decades of stereotyping that conflates masculinity with violence, hegemony, and aggression. We have to recognize that men and women are moral equals, that decent and worthy men have always known this, and that, while men and women share the most important human virtues, vices and aptitudes, they also have psychological traits that incline them toward some different activities.

According to the regnant orthodoxy, men and women should have exactly the same kinds of capacities and ambitions. They should be equally interested in becoming tycoons, winning battles, driving tractors and nurturing children. But this is not reality. In general, men don’t want to work in day-care centers or teach kindergarten, and women don’t want to be truck drivers or join the military. Moreover, women are far more likely than men to leave successful jobs to devote time to families, and women under 30 are more eager for lasting marriages and numerous children than women of their parents’ generation (doubtless yearning for what their parents denied them). We should recognize at last that, as long as women are guaranteed an equal opportunity to pursue whatever occupation they want, it does not matter that men and women on the whole still choose different vocations. Remaining injustices should be addressed by procedural liberalism, which has always brought the most solid progress. We should stop trying to re-engineer the human soul to prevent boys from being boyish, while encouraging all forms of self-expression in girls.

All that 30 years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive maleness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility. The gurus of sensitivity have tried to convince men to become open, fluid, non-hegemonic and genderless beings who are unafraid to cry. But little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we can’t give them all Ritalin. Psychologists have begun to express concern about our educational institutions’ readiness to pathologize what once would have been regarded as boyish high spirits — rough-housing, "hating" girls, locker-room language — and to treat ordinary immaturity with powerful drugs.

Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes, and the way to educate them to treat girls and women with respect is to appeal to their heroism, not to try to blot it out. Look at those kids performing daring flips on their skateboards, or sailing on their Rollerblades into the heaviest downtown traffic like warriors contemptuous of danger. They are almost always males. Look at that squeegee kid with his shaved head and horsehair plume, decked out like some road-warrior Achilles. Walk into one of those high-voltage computer emporiums, selling our century’s most potent icon for the extension of human mastery over the cosmos. Who are the salesmen? Almost always cocky young men, celebrities-in-waiting in dark suits and moussed hair, hooked on the sheer power of it all.

Channel surf on your television late at night and sample the rock videos. Nearly all the bands in those rock videos are male, snarling or plaintive over the world’s confusions and their erotic frustrations, oozing belligerence alternating with Byronic alienation and a puppyish longing for attention. Their names (Goo Goo Dolls) and attitudes (the lead singer of radiohead is wheeled around a supermarket in a giant shopping cart curled up like an overgrown 5-year-old) combine an infantile longing to return to childhood with in-your-face suspicion and distrust.

And what else would one expect, since so many of the families into which they were born ended in divorce? By denying and repressing their natural inclination to manliness, we run the risk of abandoning them to such infantile posturing. When they pierce their bodies, it is because they want to experience moral and erotic constraint. Having failed to find an authority they can respect, someone to guide them from boyish impetuosity to a mature and manly vigor of judgment, they confuse authority with oppression. Still, cast adrift in a world without any limitations, they want there to be a price to pay for their hedonism. Since no one will lead them back to the great ethical and religious traditions that set these limits on the highest intellectual and spiritual level, they pierce their bodies in a crude simulacrum of traditional restraint. And, in that, they reveal not only the wondrous capacity of spirited young people to see through the aridity of the governing orthodoxies but also the potential for an ennobling transformation.

It is precisely in a traditional understanding of manly pride and honor that we will find the only sure basis for respect between men and women. The best way of convincing young men to treat women with respect is to educate them in the traditional virtues, which make it a disgrace to treat anyone basely, dishonestly or exploitatively. Moreover, the surest way of raising young men to treat young women as friends rather than as objects for sexual exploitation is to appeal to their natural longing to be honored and esteemed by the young women to whom they are attracted. When our erotic attraction to another is properly directed, it leads us to cultivate the virtues of moderation, honest, gratitude and compassion that make us worthy of love in the eyes of the beloved. We try to be virtuous because we want to be worthy of being loved.

One thing is sure: Given our current confusion over the meaning of manliness, we have nothing to lose by re-opening the issue. If academic feminism is correct that violence toward women stems from traditional patriarchal attitudes, our grandparents’ lives must have been a hell of aggression and fear. Yet, if anything impresses us about our forebears, judging from their lives, letters and diaries, it is the refinement of their affections for one another — and of men’s esteem for women in particular. Perhaps we cannot return to that world. But boys and young men today need re-introducing to this tradition of manly civility.

Despite recent caricatures of the Western tradition as one long justification for the oppression of women, our greatest poets and thinkers from Homer to Rousseau have explored the delicate interplay of love and self-perfection. In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus, son of the great war hero Odysseus, embarks on a journey to find his missing father and thereby save his mother from the oppressive noblemen who want her to give up her husband for dead and marry one of them. As he searches for his father in an adventure parallel to Odysseus’ own search for a way home to his long-lost wife and child, Telemachus is educated by his adventures and grows from a boy into a man, guided by the wise goddess Athena, who is also his father’s best friend among the gods. Telemachus’ search for his missing father, guided by the goddess, in effect provides him with the upbringing that Odysseus was not able to give him, although he still inspires it from afar because the boy learns during his travels of his father’s exploits and wants to prove himself the hero’s worthy son.

When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mother’s protector from oppressive men, who has to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father would be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective. They are Telemachus.

at least 850,000 children nationwide are schooled at home, up from 360,000 a decade ago, according the Education Department. In New York City, which compiled citywide statistics for the first time this year, 1,800 children are being schooled at home.

Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.

They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards — uniform curriculum and more testing — which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.

"It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling," said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of "Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement" (Princeton University Press, 2001).

"The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools," he said. "And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support."

In addition to dissatisfaction with schools, Mr. Stevens and others say, social trends have fed interest in home schooling. More women are abandoning careers to stay home with their children. And many families yearn for a less frantic schedule and more time together.

"This may be a rebellion of middle-class parents in this culture," Mr. Stevens said. "We have never figured out how to solve the contradiction between work and parenting for contemporary mothers. And a highly scheduled life puts a squeeze on childhood."

Laurie Spigel, of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, chose home schooling for her 13-year-old son, Solomon, because he was overextended.

"He was taking ballet and piano and begging for flute," she said. "We'd already given up bedtime stories. He was tired all the time. We had no family life left. And all the wasted time seemed to be at school."

She had already given up on public school. A first-tier private school was so intense that "fourth grade felt like high school." So she chose home schooling, as she had for Solomon's brother Kalman, now in college.

Julia Attaway of Washington Heights made the home-schooling decision because the first of her four children was reading chapter books and counting to 100 by seven before kindergarten. "This is a very intense kid," Ms. Attaway said. "She dives into something until she has a sense of completion. It was so obvious that school was not going to work."

The Kjellbergs, Spigels and Attaways fit the profile of home-schooling families from a 1999 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, considered the only authoritative snapshot of home schooling. Nationwide, a majority of home-schooled children come from white, two-parent, one-income families with three or more children.

The top three motivations for home schooling in the survey were the prospect of a better education (49 percent), religious beliefs (38 percent) and a poor learning environment in the schools (26 percent).

Home schooling is legal in all 50 states, although there are widely different regulations. New Jersey, for instance, requires virtually no oversight. In New York, parents must notify their school district, file an instructional plan and quarterly reports and submit to annual assessments, alternating between standardized tests and portfolios.

Is this the right thing to do?

Well how good is school? We know this that authoritarian parenting shuts kids down and inhibits learning and proper socialization. We know that school is built on the authoritarian model. We know that this is the least effective model possible. We know that the typical school curriculum that breaks the world into discrete subjects make an effective world view based on systems difficult to bring into view. We know that they have poor outcomes in attainment. 40% of our kids either fail to graduate or leave without the minimum attainment to have a proper career.

We know that the poor social environment is driving a rise in bullying and promiscuity - so much for socialization being the big plus for school. We know that 30% of our sons have to be drugged to go there.

November 10, 2003

Family Violence - !n 1999 there were 57,971 “Child Care Days” where a child on PEI was in care. Children are taken into care when the family setting is deemed to be too risky for them to stay at home. Family violence is largely a product of people with poor coping skills reacting to stimuli that they cannot control. The costs in court time, protection, fostering are substantial for the state. The social costs to the family and to the child are incalculable. At the heart of the Best Start approach is a focus on establishing strong parental bonding. Research in other jurisdictions shows a dramatic difference in family violence as a result of this type of intervention.

Learning and Literacy - PEI spends on average $85,256 to graduate a child from high school. In spite of this investment, our schools are having growing difficulty with a group of children who find learning very difficult. The national percentage of those who find learning a challenge is between 20% and 30%. Boys are more vulnerable than girls. Boys who have only one female parent are most at risk. It is important to understand that this poor outcome is not the fault of the school system. This group of children enter the school system on their first day already severely prejudiced with profound learning and behavioural challenges. In spite of all the effort of dedicated teachers and social workers, most of this group will leave school without the attainment and skills to make a living in modern society. Poor social skills, an inability to listen and to comprehend, are the prerequisites of being able to learn. These skills are developed in the very early years of childhood. Much of the work of Best Start on focuses on opening up these learning pathways and setting children up to be the best that they can be.

Juvenile Crime - In 1999, there were 8,912 days spent in corrections on PEI by young men. Young men with low self-esteem and with no hope for a better future tend to commit most of our crime. Until recently, our response has been to invest more in the justice system. California spends more on prisons than on schools. The insights of the Early Years inform us that we can make a difference to juvenile crime by supporting the parents of young children. Self-esteem is a product of effective parenting and of warm family environments. This linkage is the reason for the support of the National Crime Prevention Centre for Best Start and their decision to invest in strategic prevention.

Teen Pregnancy - In 1999 on PEI there were 5,000 single parent families. Most of these, over 4,000, were headed by women and most of these were young women. As with boys who commit crime, the evidence suggests that teen pregnancy is often also a product of poor self-esteem. The costs of teen pregnancies are considerable both in direct terms of social support but also in human terms. In most cases there is a direct correlation between single parenthood and poverty. In many cases, the cycle of poor self-esteem continues into the next generation. The best time to work on esteem issues is in the early years and the best way to help a mother regain her own self-esteem is to help her become an excellent mother herself.

Employability - PEI persists in having one of the higher rates of unemployment in Canada. There are many causes for this complex situation but poor attainment at school and low employability are important drivers. People with a poor experience at school are most at risk. The 1996 census shows that 43% of adults on PEI had not graduated from high school. This compares to the national average of 34%. Again the only effective time to make a difference to this pattern is in the early years.

Smoking and Addiction - PEI is ranks second, at a rate of 33.6%, in Canada, with the highest rate of smokers who are aged between 15-24. Smoking drives a significant later burden of poor health, chronic illness and early death. PEI has the highest death rate from lung cancer in the nation. Research tells us that smoking is not as much an individual issue of will power but is a societal issue largely driven by environmental and control issues. Smoking is one of the significant factors in poor health that we can identify. Changing smoking habits is very difficult. As with all addiction, common sense and information have little impact on the addict’s ability to change powerful habits. Smoking is strongly linked to self-esteem and to place in the social order. So again the root for taking much effective action is in the early years where an intervention with parents and in the home has a chance of working.

Obesity and Diabetes - The establishment of good nutritional habits. One of the trends of modern society is obesity. Atlantic Canada and PEI have the dubious distinction of being the most obese part of Canada. In Canada, 29 per cent of boys are now overweight, almost double the 1981 rate of 15 per cent. Among girls, the rate rose to 24 per cent from 15 per cent in the same period. The number of children considered obese now tips the scales at 14 per cent for boys and 12 per cent for girls, almost triple the 1981 rate of 5 per cent. Poor nutrition is directly related to obesity which in turn drives a pathway for a significant series of health-related outcomes, such as diabetes and Coronary Heart Disease. There is no “cure” for the diseases of obesity and there is no adult way of sustaining a significant weight loss. We can however intervene at the foundation of obesity. How and what we eat at home as young children sets up exceptionally powerful lifetime habits. By 6 the pattern for eating and meals is set for life. If supported, parents can develop the skills and the habit off eating well when their children are young and so set a different pattern and a different pathway.

Utilization of the Health System - Healthcare costs are rising faster than our economy can afford. Health Canada warns that Canadian healthcare costs could double in the next 10 years. The large and aging population, the increasing costs of drugs and of new technologies will drive these costs. Most of the costs, particularly the geometric increase in the use of drugs, are driven by the heavy user. The profile of the heavy user includes the poorly educated, the poorly nourished, heavy smokers, the over-weight, the under-employed and those with poor social support systems. The expressions of poor health in this group tends to include, circulatory disorders, respiratory disorders, back pain and non-specific chronic pain. Obesity also is driving an epidemic of adult-onset diabetes which weakens the overall immune system opening up other avenues of health problems a high incidence of Coronary Heart Disease. None of these problems are easily and cheaply dealt with by the healthcare system. They tend to be chronic and require constant intervention The research informs us that this group became high risk as young children. Intervening in the early years gives us a chance to reduce the pool of heavy users.

November 09, 2003

I am 53. If you are my age or maybe even in your 40's you will maybe share my bemusement about what is happening to our kids. Yes there was the occasional flash of violence where a boy driven to desperation might challenge him to a boxing duel; I did meet the odd easy girl;yes there was a bit of bullying; yes there might have been two fat boys in my whole school; yes one of two boys in the whole school did not fit in at all. But did I even come close to experiencing or witnessing what is now commonplace with children today? No way!

Just to remind us all about what we now take for granted now. On PEI sex is commonplace for girls as young as 12. It is not just oral sex but going the whole way in the school washroom on the floor. If you think I exaggerate have a real heart to heart with a teacher. Amazing to me for whom young girls were sacrosanct, boys of 18 think nothing of having sex with a 12 year old. The "Ho" look is now essential to fit in. If you don't wear a thong, you are a loser. 30% of boys are on Ritalin. Think about this before you pass onto the next point. 30% of our boys have to take drugs so that they can cope at school and at home. Most of the really dreadful violence such as at Columbine does not occur in inner city schools but in middle class or even upper middle class settings. Its the kids who have all the things who are most desperate. PEI sent a choir to France recently. One of the sights that struck the parents who accompanied the kids was not the Eiffel Tower but the fact that not one - not one - of the French kids was fat and about half the PEI kids were fat. Bullying is endemic and no longer linked only to boys. There have been girls who have killed girls and girl hazing is as bad as anything in the Paratroopers.

Like the fog in the pot of water that is slowly heating, we have not noticed as life for our children has grown steadily worse over the last 30 years. Well folks the water is boiling now and we have to act. But what is the problem? We at least can sense that there is a problem. All the issues are now out in the open with sex at school being the last one to make the front-page and our news screen. In response of course we have started to blame others. TV, the Media, advertising, poverty, the teachers and the schools. We point to the hooker look of the stars, we point to how women's bodies have been forced into an ideal shape and every product has sexual overtones. We point to the inanity of TV and its hypnotic effect. We complain about the consumerization of our world and how our kids now have to have all these things. We think that violence is is a problem of poverty when it is in reality mainly middle class kids who are in trouble. We blame the fast food firms who tempt our kids to eat the wrong things and we blame the teacher who cannot control our kids. Well folks it is time to hang up the mirror and to look at ourselves as parents.

Something has changed in a generation to give disconnect our kids from their intuitive good sense.

We as parents are not paying our children enough attention. We are not paying enough attention to ourselves. We have become consumed by a distraction. It is called work. Our relationship to work has become distorted and it is leaving us bereft of the energy that we need to parent well and to keep ourselves well. We are becoming the most spiritually poor group of humans to have lived.

I am going to say things now that are hard to hear but if you have a better idea, let's hear it I think that we made the world of work the central part of our life. We have always worked but is the culture of the the world of work that has changed. The problem is not work but the prevailing culture in the workplace.

For my father work was more like a family. There was a contract of mutuality. Loyalty was rewarded, lifetime friendships were established amongst people who lived and worked in communities. Yes there was anguish and conflict in some areas such as in the birth of the steel and auto industries - this was not golden age. But there was true community at work and at home.

Now the last remnant of the old contract of loyalty and service has been broken and all at work are expendable - work has truly become a rat race for most of us. It increasingly consumes us and changes the way we see ourselves and everyone else around us. In the global rat race you have no colleagues you have only competitors. We leave our communities and travel to places where we have no connection or relationships. It is becoming every-woman for herself. Everyone feels helpless and no one feels that they have a voice. This is not just true in business but parts of the public sector are if anything worse. Know any happy nurses or teachers?

So why do I raise this. OK he is going to say that women made a mistake and have to go back to June Cleaver Land. No I am not saying this. I am saying that how we organize work today has become inimical to life. At work we find a culture of the "Borg". We take home these lifeless relationships and we play them out with our spouses and with our young children. Becoming only objects at work, we treat ourselves and those that we love at home increasingly as objects. We see care as being objects. We see things as being care. We see objects as love. We see each other as being disposable.

This is why the media can tap into us so easily. They feed on our feeling that if I had this new object I would feel better. They feed on our loneliness and on our pain. If I act out enough might she pay attention to me? If I wear this I will be attractive. If I give him a BJ, I will be popular. I get a BJ from a kid I am powerful. If I bully I have power in a world where I have power. If I eat this I feel comforted.
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I say these things not because I am a good person and you are not. I am guilty of this too. In the mid 1980's I was a "successful" investment banker. I earned lots of money that only a career in crime could replicate. I travelled incessantly, I was at work all hours of the day and when I was home I was still at work in my mind. We had all the goodies. Nice homes, kids at private school, all the cars, clothes etc. But Robin was miserable. She was raising Hope and James on her own. She was in effect a single parent. I could not see that - after all I was focusing all my energy on important things like my work. One evening she broke down and in tears told me how unhappy she was - there it was on the table. My response. I said I am doing all of work for you. Look at all the great things that we have. I am doing all of this for you - what more do you want I asked.

"You" she said. "You". "We want you". It took me a long time to understand what she meant. Many of us lie to ourselves when we go to work. We say that we do this for us but we do it for me most of the time. We say that we need the things but our spouses and our children do not need the things they need a real relationship with us.

Our choice is not about work or not - it is about what relationship we chose to have with work. The context will be to understand why relationships are so essential to humans and how we seem to lost hold of that insight and how we have organized a world that kills relationships which will in turn kill us by shutting down our next generation.

I am going to be writing a series of articles about this topic this week and I will be drawing on the science of relationships that is contained in a remarkable book called the General Theory of Love. We will look at how small babies have to attach themselves to us. We will look at how they do this and we look at how our emotional brain as opposed to our thinking brain affects so much of our lives. We will then think of some of the choices that we have in this context

October 31, 2003

The Big IdeaThe message of the Early Years is that we are most capable of learning until the age of 6. Underpinning this message is the idea of "plasticity". This is not news. What might become news is if we find out what to do with this knowledge.

For the problem is that we have not known what to do about this knowledge. We have not known how to move from concept to action? Until now.

We believe that the research has now come together to provide us with a clear direction and a clear focus. If we focus on the acquisition of vocab by the age of 2 and its drivers the amount and quality of conversation and the amount and timing of touch we believe that we will have resolved the gigantic complexity of the early years into a field narrow enough yet powerful enough to get movement. This series of articles will explore this proposition and link the separate areas of research into a coherent and self supporting whole.

The trajectory of vocab
Our brains and our world view are open to many choices at birth but by 3 many of the alternatives and the trajectory for our future development is largely set. By the age of 2 the size of our vocabulary will indicate how we will be able to learn all the way through school.

This slide shows us a dramatic picture. Vocab is a powerful and measurable predictive factor. If we measure an infant's ability to understand vocabulary at 2 we can get a strong sense of the development trajectory for life. Much of the research now informs us that by 4 the vocab trajectory is largely set. Infants with a vocab of 150 or less will normally develop on a very shallow trajectory reaching by grade 10 an ability of grade 5. At the other end of the scale, infants with a vocab of 300 words will be on track for an exponential trajectory leading to a vocab of a 2nd year university student in grade 10.

This revelation about the predictive power of vocab attainment raises the issue of the idea of Trajectories and when they are able to be influenced. Chaos theory tells us that "Initial Conditions" are the most powerful element in how systems unfold. It is likely that vocab attainment in the Early Years represents the measure of the Initial Conditions of human development.

The impact of this ideaThis insight has huge implications for how we as a society consider our current investment in the education system that begins age 6

Here are three consecutive links to a series of articles that explore this in depth. Each article is also linked so that, if you choose, you can go deeper into each main idea. My intent is to pull together a wide range of research that has not easily been accessible for the lay person and to combine this insight into the Early Years with a suggestion for how we might use network principles to form an organization that could help us all.

October 28, 2003

I have been exploring touch over the last few days. One of my aha's is that while we think we are so modern, we are primates. We may have been homo sapiens for 40,000 years and we may have been "civilized" for 4,000 years but we have been primates for 4 million years. How important is touch to primates? Harlow's famous experiment some monkeys were given a wire mummy. The others a cloth fuzzy mummy. The wire monkey had food the cloth fuzzy monkey did not. The babies huddled with the cloth monkey. Grooming is at the heart of the social welfare of primates. Robin Dunbar's thesis is that language itself arose from grooming. Gossip is in effect long distance grooming.

Yet we are so frightened of creating dependency and maybe also of the sexual aspects of touch that most of us hardly touch our babies much when compared to primates and to most traditional human societies. Car seats, strollers, cribs and playpens are now the essential kit that we have as parents.

Our babies are in effect born six months premature. Our brain is so big that if we went to term, women would have such wide hips that they could not walk. Only marsupials, who have nice pouches, have more helpless infants than humans. I was brought up the traditional way and we brought our kids up the same. We were taken at the moment of birth and "cleaned up" by the doctors and nurses. Then whisked away to the nursery. We were presented to our mothers on schedule for feeding. At home the separation continued. I still recall biting my hand as we heard Hope cry for us from her room.

What I have been reading recently, The Continuum Concept, The Vital Touch and What's Going On In There - (links in the books section on the left) is quite clear. Babies need as much touch as possible in the first 6 months of life. I will be reviewing these books in detail in the next few days.

Bottom line if we fill the touch need of an infant, she will be quite independent. It's a paradox that I see so clearly in our two dogs. Jay was abandoned as a puppy and spent 4 months in the pound. He is by my feet as I type this. He cannot stay away. Mildred was raised with her mummy and then moved off with her litter mates and then into our bed and into the bed of her foster mum Ann while we away. She is the most independent dog out. Always on her own and not "needing"

October 20, 2003

Here is a review from Amazon of the more accesible book available "What's Going on In There" that shows you what is going on in the brain of your baby.

Subtitled 'How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life' and written by a neuroscientist mother of three, this book benefits as much from its organization as the material it presents. Research, supplemented with anecdotes, is divided into chapters based on sense or function and then detailed chronologically within each section. Chapters include: The Basic Biology of Brain Development; How Birth Affects the Brain; The Importance of Touch; The Early World of Smell; Taste, Milk, and the Origins of Food Preference; Wiring Up the Visual Brain; How Hearing Evolves; Motor Milestones; Social-Emotional Growth; The Experience of Memory; Language and the Developing Brain; How Intelligence Grows in the Brain; Nature, Nurture, and Sex Differences in Intellectual Development; How to Raise a Smarter Child.

This is one of those books you should write in -- underline, highlight, take notes -- because if you are indeed interested in using this information to understand your child's progressive developmental changes, you will be referring to it often. The author presents a lot of research material in accessible language and style, but the book is dense and is not a day-to-day how-to guide. You will not read about colic or how to tell a cold from the flu, but you will learn why your four-month old prefers a little salt in her mashed potatoes or why most of us can't recall anything that happened before we were three-and-a-half years old. Because there is a lot of information, this is not one of the easiest books you will ever read, but it is eminently worthwhile. The author not only synopsizes a lot of research for us, but also defines the limits of research and/or those issues which are still under debate or not yet fully understood, and discusses the evolutionary implications of various developmental changes.

A Notes section details sources so you can follow up in areas in which you're particularly interested. (With 458 Notes, I'm not sure why one reviewer criticized the book for lack of documentation.) A thorough index. This book seems to benefit as much from good editing as exemplary authorship.

This is not a how to book but really a view of the world book that can help you in your daily life with babies and small children.

Here is the big idea that is at the core of the book and maybe at the core of our uncertainty as parents today. Liedloff feels that every species, including us, has developed time-proven & highly adaptive methods of raising the young. Our problem, she feels, is that when we became "civilized", and so gave our intellect the upper hand, we have lost touch with how humans raise children in the traditional way. So in only the last 3,000 years, we threw away the experience of millions of years. The one set of theories that we tend not to value are the practices of traditional people. After all what do they know they are primitive?

She believes that if we are humble, we can learn a lot from the 4 million years of accumulated wisdom that is innately in us and in our children. 4 million years is enough time to make this wisdom adaptive. We intuitively know what to do and our babies know what they need.

Liedloff spent 3 years with tribal people in South America who opened a window of insight into some ideas that we have lost. Here are some of them.

1. Touch in the first 6 months is the most important foundation for development. Babies are born about 6 months before they can do the simplest thing such as sit up on their own. They are born in effect prematurely. Why? Because our brain is so large for our size that women's bodies could not adapt to having the large pelvis required to take us to term without giving up being able to walk and run. In traditional societies, babies are not separated from their mothers in the first 6 months of life. They are kept in a sling and/or hip all the time including all night. The traditional baby is not however the centre of the mother's life, it is simply attached to it. Traditional babies are thus constantly in motion, as they were in the womb. They are highly stimulated by witnessing their mother's life. They are touched all the time. They hear adults talking all the time.

Aha! You say impractical for today and we will spoil the baby. Here is Liedloff's big insight. The well attached baby becomes intensely independent. It seems that there is a quota of touch that we need when an infant which if we get it releases this hunger for dependency. Liedloff goes the other way. She suggests that our hunger for the touch that many of us missed in the first 6 months drives much of our cravings for the rest of our life. Modern research supports the power of attachment as the driver for high lifetime coping and learning skills. Touch is at the heart of attachment for both child and mother.

2. Traditional People make it clear to infants and babies that while they are loved that they are the junior member of the society. Horror! Children not the centre of the universe? What Liedloff means is that traditional children are given their quota of high touch and then are put into a self directed learning environment. If a child approaches an adult for physical love or attention, the adult will respond by giving it what it wants. But the adult will not make a big deal out of this attention and will usually carry on with whatever it is doing at the time. The adult continues to cook, talk to her friends - whatever. The point? In traditional societies, children find their place.

3. Traditional children are exposed to lots of words - they hear adults talk all the time - but the principal method of communication with infants and toddlers is by touch and not by argument or discussion. Touch is used over eye contact as well. The essence of learning in traditional societies is by experience and not by words. Parents do not reason with a 2 year old. If the 2 year old acts out, a very rare occurrence in high touch children, they are ignored. The anger is vented on nothing. Love is expressed not in words but in touch and in physical care

4. Children learn what risk is by themselves. We went out and bought a stair gate as Hope became a toddler. We were concerned that she would fall down the stairs. A friend cautioned us. "One day you will forget and as Hope does not know the risks herself she could fall". So we taught Hope instead how to approach stairs by letting her fall and catch her. A cheap lesson that required us to be close but not stop the first part of the accident. We then taught her to recognize stairs and to go onto her tummy and toboggan down.

Traditional societies do even less intervening than we did and let the kids work out most risks on their own. The point? When you learn that the stairs have risk or that if you fall into the pool it is bad, you don't need a fence to keep you from getting into trouble. There is less risk when the child learns about the risk than in any action that you can take. More importantly you learn that there is risk in the world and how to cope systemically with it - important lessons.

We will explore attachment and touch a great deal as time goes on. We will find ways of bringing this into the reality of life as we live it today

The debate rages about formal or informal learning. Here is an excellent article on the mismatch between how we really learn and how organizations - including schools - see learning.

For most of us, we learn all the important lessons before we go to school. We learn how to talk. If we were exposed to more than one language before 4, we would learn a second or even a third language easily. We learn to walk and to have eye, hand foot coordination. We learn who we are and where we fit. We learn the rudiments of social life. If our parents encouraged us we would already know how to read and more importantly would like reading. We could acquire a host of skills if we had the opportunity.

Friends of mine with wondrous children who observe the world and who find the wonder in it have told me that they worry about when they go to school and have all of this sense of being an explorer knocked out of them

October 19, 2003

The world of research and the practical world are normally separated in our society. We hope that we can build a bridge in this front page of a family of related sites between the research community, the family resource community and parents.

Our focus will be on what we can do in the period between conception and 3 to support our children to be the best that they can be.